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.This might be said to fit very well with the unmistakable utopian strand in Bauman’s work; with the idea that humanity could/should embrace the open-ended possibilities rather than surrendering to the idea that things ‘are as they are’ and ‘there is no alternative’ (Jacobsen 2004, 2006).Bauman’s metaphors are intended to make us see and think more clearly about what is happening, but also about what could happen.His metaphors make us reconsider the world around us.They are inherently moral, they give voice to the voiceless, they recall us to our inescapable human and moral responsibility for ‘the Other’and point to the hidden possibilities behind the immediately observable reality, to a world not yet closed down by mechanical models, mathematical reasoningBauman on Metaphors23or rational argument, to a world capable of being re-enchanted and transformed.Like utopia or morality, metaphor points to imagination rather than logic, to infinity rather than totality, to possibility rather than probability.In the case of Zygmunt Bauman, his metaphors are methods of possibility pointing to a world existing parallel to reality as we know, recognize and perceive it.He encourages us to see things differently, and here metaphors belong to or exemplify Bauman’s favourite sociological strategy: defamiliarization.Defamiliarization consists of making the obvious non-obvious, looking at life from unexpected and unexplored angles, constructing the well-known as strange, but “most importantly, it may open up new and previously unsuspected possibilities of living one’s life with more self-awareness, more comprehension” (Bauman 1990:15).Metaphor is the archetypal linguistic weapon in such defamiliarization strategy.Armed with it, Bauman seeks to transcend and transform our commonsensical and doxic assumptions about the apparent inevitability, naturalness or immutability of the world we inhabit, its history, its direction, its possibilities and our positions within it.Bauman observes that we live in a society “which no longer recognizes any alternative to itself and therefore feels absolved from the duty to examine, demonstrate, justify (let alone prove) the validity of its outspoken and tacit assumptions” (Bauman 2001:99).As a consequence of man’s (and indeed also sociologists’) inability to ‘see the whole of society’, metaphors fruitfully perform, at least, four interrelated functions in social science research or writings.First, they are transforming – by their invocation they creatively change our conception of the world as it is and allows us to catch a glimpse of a world redeemed from the limitations of realism.Second, they are transferring – they use the language of one domain and transfer it to another, often in a quite absurd fashion (take as an example Erving Goffman’s metaphor of the theatre to highlight aspects of social interaction in everyday life), thereby creating fruitful resemblances.Third, they are transmuting – they reorganize and reconfigure our ingrained ideas and notions about the social world and its fundamental workings whereby we may perceive it more clearly or more creatively.Finally, they are transcending – they allow us to transcend conventional academic doxa or common sense with refreshing perspectives or surprising juxtapositions.In short, with metaphors sociologists may hope to see further or deeper than they would be allowed to without metaphors (Antoft, Jacobsen & Kupferberg 2007).Metaphors, however, are but one example of Bauman’s overall methodological embeddedness somewhere along – or transcending – the dividing-line between social science and literature.Although the way that Bauman writes is tremendously significant, what he writes about is obviously of paramount importance.One might argue that Bauman’s extensive and frankly awe-inspiring body of work has by and large addressed the plight of those ‘cast out’ from society, those who have been marginalized, forgotten, and ultimately ‘wiped out’.Bauman’s own personal experience of exile undoubtedly aids his ‘outsider’ perspective, yet the longevity and passion of his commitment to the plight of the underdog suggests a deeper and more worthy source for this concern.The way that Bauman practices sociology is informed by his compassion, his instinctive sense of what is ‘right’ in the face of much easier and ‘economically viable’ yet also less ‘humane’ options.Bauman’s metaphors deal with the ‘big issues’ like the Holocaust or globalization, yet their relevance and utility24The Sociology of Zygmunt Baumanextends into our everyday lives, informing the ways in which we daily negotiate our shared humanity.Thus, Bauman’s many metaphors and archetypes – e.g., of humans (‘tourists’, ‘vagabonds’ and ‘gamblers’), of societies (‘solid’ and ‘liquid’modern) and of utopias (‘gamekeeping’, ‘gardening’ and ‘hunting’) (see Jacobsen & Marshman 2008) – urge us to look at the human failings and historical catastrophes of the not so distant past and present in order to exercise greater personal and societal vigilance and responsibility in the present and in the future which is not yet.Let us briefly look as some selected metaphors from Bauman’s cornucopia.Notions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ dominate most of Bauman’s writing, questions of who is to be ‘excluded’ and who is to be ‘included’; of who can be incorporated into the ‘ideal’ order and who remains forever unassimilable.Bauman addresses the question of which individuals constitute the ‘waste’ of liquid modernity, and his use of the ‘disposal’ metaphor calls to mind a more sinister history, that of Jews as ‘weeds’ and Nazis as ‘gardeners’.Bauman’s gardening metaphor was used to maximum effect in his appraisal of the Holocaust as the ‘natural’ (for modernity was intrinsically anti-nature) and inevitable product of modernity.Bauman observed that modern society was managed like a garden.By following a strict plan/design/blueprint, a pipedream of purity, a perfect garden/society could emerge; one that was purged of any wild, undesirable elements.The ‘gardeners’ of modernity, of which the Nazis were the very best/worst example, were armed “with a vision of harmonious colours and of the difference between pleasing harmony and revolting cacophony; with determination to treat as weeds every self-invited plant … with machines and poison adequate to the task of exterminating the weeds” (Bauman 1989:57).In the era of ‘solid modernity’, it was the Jews who were defined as weeds that were unable to be “incorporated into the rational order, whatever the effort” (Bauman 1989:65).Such ‘weeds’ were fit only for extermination.Here we encounter the danger of metaphors when in the wrong hands.The term ‘weed’ was as much a euphemism as a metaphor.The Nazis used such metaphorical language to remove the Jews from the sphere of moral consideration and human obligation
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